Every location in 1959 was built small, photographed exhaustively, and reconstructed as a Gaussian splat — a cloud of several million coloured, oriented, semi-transparent blobs that together hold the original light. These are those captures, straight out of the solve.
What you are looking at below is not a render of a model. It is a photograph of a room that fits in a garage, turned inside out until you can move through it. The wrong bits — the floaters, the smeared corners, the places where the solve gave up — have been left in. They are the most honest thing on this page.
Capture 01Kashmir Restaurant
The one room in the film that was ever happy. Four tables, two and a half metres of bar, one wall — and a forty-cover dining room once the capture opens it up. The pendants are practical and captured lit, which is why the highlights on the tablecloths move correctly when the camera does.
- Stills
- 1,914 frames, 35 mm, f/8
- Splats
- 4.2 million
- Captured
- Unit 6, March 2024
- Solve
- 31 hours, single GPU
Capture 02Bathysphere Station
Twelve ribs, one dome, and a sphere that is a genuine two-metre ball of MDF and salvaged brass. Cora arrives and leaves through here, and the whole film is bracketed by the sound of its cradle letting go. The capture was shot in a single eleven-hour session because the lamps were rented by the day.
- Stills
- 2,240 frames, 24 mm, f/8
- Splats
- 5.6 million
- Captured
- Unit 6, June 2024
- Solve
- 44 hours, single GPU
Capture 03Pavilion Corridor
Six metres of corridor doing the work of sixty. The trick is the runner: a single strip of carpet and two brass lines that give the eye something to follow, so the repeat never registers. This is also the set we flooded, and the one the tattoo studio downstairs has still not forgiven us for.
- Stills
- 1,180 frames, 28 mm, f/8
- Splats
- 3.1 million
- Captured
- Unit 6, September 2024
- Solve
- 22 hours, single GPU
Capture 04Fontaine's Fisheries
Crates, chains, three work lamps and a window onto black water. It appears for ninety seconds and took the longest to build, which is the oldest joke in the business. The stencilled lettering on the crates was done by hand by a props master who insisted, correctly, that printed ones would read as printed.
- Stills
- 1,606 frames, 24 mm, f/8
- Splats
- 4.8 million
- Captured
- Unit 6, November 2024
- Solve
- 36 hours, single GPU
About the viewer
The interactive captures are not public yet. They are large — between three and six million splats each, which is roughly two hundred megabytes before anything clever happens — and we would rather ship them properly than ship them slow. Until then, each plate above opens full size, and every frame you can see was rendered straight out of the capture with nothing painted on top.
When the viewers go live they will run in the browser, on a mid-range laptop, with mouse or touch orbit and no plug-in. If you want telling the day that happens, the contact page is the only list we keep.